Under Gang’s Rule, a Mexican City Loses Hope in the State

A shop was burned in Apatzingán, Mexico. Many thought the attack was a message from the gang the Knights Templar.

Rodrigo Cruz for The New York Times

By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD

January 16, 2014

APATZINGÁN, Mexico — Like the shutters closing in an old Western, the metal gates on storefronts in this town slammed shut and their owners fled as first a powerful drug gang took hold and then the federal police and soldiers arrived to restore order, stirring fears of a bloody showdown.

There was good reason: Even as the federal forces massed in and around City Hall on Tuesday, a pharmacy was burned around the corner, which many took as a signal that the criminal gang with a lock grip here was still in control. On Wednesday night, somebody was shot yards from the regional offices of the federal prosecutor, where dozens of officers are now stationed. Last week, City Hall itself was firebombed, its lobby scarred with soot and still smelling of smoke.

But instead of taking on the gang that had terrorized the town, the military ended up shooting three local residents protesting the government’s efforts to disarm a self-proclaimed self-defense force that had sprung up to fight the outlaws. The shootings set off widespread outrage.

“The army and the government have been discredited because instead of pursuing criminals, they have attacked the people defending themselves against them,” the local Roman Catholic bishop, Miguel Patiño Velázquez, wrote Wednesday night in a letter to the community. “There is no authority stopping” the gang’s leaders, he wrote.

The gang is called the Knights Templar, so named, scholars of the drug trade say, as a nod to its quasi-religious doctrine and its belief, like those of the Crusades, that it is valiant and noble. Like the self-defense groups, it, too, began with a stated aim to root out the feared Zetas gang but ended up a large criminal organization itself.

This city of 99,000 people, the capital of Mexico’s lime- and avocado-producing region, is widely described as the gang’s stronghold, an assertion that is easy to believe given the recent violence and the palpable climate of fear.

“You have to pay them quotas or they burn your business down or kidnap you or your wife or girls,” said a street vendor selling pirated videos near the burned pharmacy. “I have paid, everybody pays. And all the police and politicians are in on it, too.”

That is the widespread perception here, where the Catholic vicar general, Javier Cortes, said one organized group or another had kept the town under its thumb for close to a decade, with little interference from the state or federal authorities.

The mayor, Uriel Chávez Mendoza, surrounded Thursday by well-armed municipal bodyguards, begged to differ. The rumors that he is a Knight Templar himself and that the group controls city hall are “just what they are saying on social media networks, but it’s not the truth.” He was careful not to take sides and declared the city now on the path to tranquillity.

Truckloads of federal police officers and soldiers arrived recently to restore order, but the violence has continued.

Rodrigo Cruz for The New York Times

Not many here have much hope that will happen, predicting that the surge of federal forces will soon abate and give way to the same complacency and neglect that allowed the Knights Templar to gain a foothold and prompted the rise of the vigilantes.

President Enrique Peña Nieto, who had vowed to steer the conversation about Mexico to the economy rather than violence, appointed a special commissioner to oversee the federal response in the state, but has not commented publicly about the crisis, maintaining a normal schedule.

While the self-defense groups no longer appear to be planning to take control of Apatzingán, promising in some cases to patrol side by side with the federal police, residents here still view them as a viable alternative.

The Rev. Gerardo López, a local priest, said businessmen who had fled were financing the self-defense groups and still making plans to displace the Knights here and in the surrounding countryside.

One businessman who fled to nearby Jalisco State about six years ago said in a telephone interview that he had provided about $20,000 to the self-defense groups in the past year, hoping they restore order.

“I had the luck that many didn’t, the luck of fleeing,” he said on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. “Many of those who stayed are now dead.”

Father Cortes said young people joined the gang because it paid more than working in a store or picking fruit in the fields. “It’s easier to sit around with a gun or cellphone than work the fields,” he said.

Others have been forced to work for the gang under threat of death, he said.

The Knights Templar’s main source of income has been trafficking methamphetamine to the United States, with the state of Michoacán a prime source of the drug. But as with many other drug gangs, it has branched out to other sources of revenue, including illegally mined iron ore.

The military took control of Lázaro Cárdenas, the principal Pacific port city, from the gang in November. But its rackets are so extensive that few expect any serious takedown of the group to occur anytime soon, and most people here assume they are being watched by the gang.

“Your neighbor could be one of them, and you won’t know until you cross them,” said a government official here who declined to be identified out of fear of death.

As truckloads of federal police officers and soldiers cruised the streets, several people sought to keep up a sense of normalcy. A mariachi group came out to rehearse on the sidewalk the other night, some shopkeepers reopened their stores, children chased pigeons in the central square and the mayor promised a coming city festival would proceed.

Carmen Enriquez, a secretary on a taco break, rolled her eyes at all the fuss.

“One group comes, and then another, and then the police; this city has seen it all and we go on,” she said. “If you have the money to leave you do, but for those who stay we just have to go on.”